Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

How could it be expected that public servants would stay out of politics as the
model naively assumes they should when the bureaucracy was the most powerful
political force? How can Weber’s model of rational–legal authority apply
when the rule of law is itself weak?
Compounding these problems was the fact that developing countries failed
to thrive under the traditional model of administration and the failures were
more often than not failures of governance. In part due to the apparent failures of
the traditional model of administration developing countries began to experiment
with other forms. If the key characteristic of the traditional model is bureaucracy
and the key characteristic of new public management is the use of markets, it was
clear that developing countries began to discard the traditional model at the same
time as they began to adopt market approaches more generally.
The public management reforms
In recent years, developing countries have changed their attitudes to the public
sector and its management, in part resulting from changes in their views on the
economy. In Eastern Europe, for example, there is a new-found appreciation
for market economies and the transition to a market economy ‘clearly requires
both the elimination of a range of existing government institutions and practices,
and the introduction of new agencies, with new goals, staffed with people
having different attitudes and behaviour’ (Rice, 1992, p. 116). Changes
have been made which mirror the managerial changes in the developed world.
These occur most of all both as changes to the role of government as economies
are liberalized, as well as reductions in public enterprise and the adoption of
public management. The World Bank’s World Development Report first raised
the issue in 1983 as ‘development failures and disappointments were now seen
not simply as the result of inappropriate policy choices but also because state
institutions were performing poorly’ (Turner and Hulme, 1997, p. 105). This was
to be a persistent theme in subsequent reports on development.
The role of government
Public Management in Developing Countries 227
In response to attacks on the role and size of government in the 1970s and
1980s (see Chapter 4), the idea became current that the best government was
minimal government in the developing world as well as the developed. Many
countries saw the need to further define the role of government in order to
move away from central planning and allow economic liberalization, privatization
of public enterprises and change the management of government. Some of
this was in response to continuing failure to develop or pass on economic benefits
to the society as a whole instead of a narrow elite. Some of it was also in
response to demands made by international agencies requiring market reforms
and public sector cuts.